Threat Vector

SIXTY-THREE

Jack Ryan, Jr., drove across the Francis Scott Key Bridge, his eyes fixed on a taxi in the traffic one hundred yards ahead.

It was just after seven in the morning, and Jack had tailed the cab since it left Melanie’s Alexandria carriage-house apartment twenty minutes earlier.

Today was the third day in a row he had shown up at her place before dawn, parking his car several blocks over from Princess Street and then finding a secluded spot in a tiny garden across the street. Each day he watched her windows with his binoculars as soon as there was enough light in the sky to do so, and he stayed there until she left for work, walking up the street to catch the Metro.

Then, for the past two days anyhow, he’d checked her mailbox and her trash, but he’d not found anything of value. He’d left within minutes of her departure for work, and he’d spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how he was going to confront her about Center.

Today his plan had been to break into her flat once she left; he knew he could pick her door lock with ease, but his plan had been derailed when a cab pulled up to her door at six-forty and she’d rushed out, already dressed for work.

Jack hurried back to his car, and then caught up to the taxi on the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. He’d recognized early on that she wasn’t going to her job in McLean, but instead was heading into D.C.

Now, as he followed her off the bridge and into Georgetown, he thought about the murder of all the CIA officers two weeks earlier, and it sickened him to think she might have somehow been involved.

“Unwittingly, Jack,” he said, telling himself aloud she would not be working either against him or for the Chinese without being seriously duped.

He wanted to believe it, anyway.

His phone chirped in the console. He touched the hands-free button on the steering wheel.

“Ryan.”

“Jack, it’s Ding.”

“Hey. Are you in Beijing?”

“Yes. Sorry, no time to talk. I just called the Gulfstream. You need to be at BWI in an hour.”

Shit. He was almost an hour away from Baltimore as it was. He’d have to break off his tail of Melanie’s car and haul ass. But then something else occurred to him. “I’m on suspension, remember?”

“Granger rescinded it.”

“Okay. Roger that. I’m in D.C., en route to BWI. Where am I heading?”

“Hong Kong.”

Jack knew it was unlikely Ding’s satellite call was being monitored, and Gavin and his team had spent hours searching his car for trackers or listening devices, but he also knew there was no point in saying anything more that could give away operational intel, so he asked no more questions.

“Okay,” he said, and he hung up. He was thick in the streets of Georgetown now, and the best way north to Baltimore was up ahead, so he continued following Melanie’s cab until he could turn off.

He could not see the taxi at the moment because a dry-cleaning van had pulled out of a drive on P Street directly behind it.

As Jack drove he thought about just calling Melanie and talking to her. If he was going to Hong Kong he would not get any answers about what was going on for days, at least, and that worried him greatly. But he also worried that if he did talk to her, she might pick up on the fact he was leaving town, and this could be dangerous to his mission.

Because Center would know.

As they crossed over the Rock Creek Parkway, Jack resigned himself to the fact that he would get no answers, but then he saw the taxi turn onto the on-ramp for the parkway. Jack realized she would be heading north, too, which was odd, because he could not imagine why she had the cab run her into Georgetown just to leave D.C.

He accelerated as he crossed the overpass to make the turn on the ramp, but ahead of him he saw the dry-cleaning van pull up alongside Melanie’s cab, as if it was trying to pass her on the steeply graded one-lane looping on-ramp.

“Idiot,” he said as he watched from some seventy-five yards back.

Just then, as the van pulled directly next to the taxi, its side door opened. It was such an odd sight that Ryan did not know what was happening at first, and he was slow to recognize danger.

Until he saw the barrel of a submachine gun appear from the dark interior of the van.

Before his eyes, the gun fired a long automatic burst, flame and smoke blew from the barrel, and the front passenger-side window of the cab exploded in a cloud of glass dust.

Jack screamed inside his BMW as Melanie’s cab veered hard to the left, drove off the ramp on the inside of the turn, and then flipped and rolled down the hill, coming to rest on its roof.

The dry-cleaning van stopped lower on the ramp, and two armed men leapt out of the back.

Jack was armed with his Glock 23, but he was too far back to stop his car here and engage the men at the bottom of the ramp. Instead, acting more on impulse than anything else, he drove the BMW 335i off the ramp at speed, launched through the air, hit the grassy hill, and then skidded sideways as he lost control, careening down to the bottom of the hill toward the upside-down taxi.

Jack’s airbag deployed and slammed him in the face; his arms flew through the air helter-skelter as the BMW bottomed out and then bounced back into the air. He sideswiped a tree on the hill, skidded through grass and mud, and then slammed down again at the bottom of the hill and came to rest. The windshield was badly cracked, but through it Ryan realized he was facing the two gunmen, fifteen yards ahead and approaching the taxi.

Jack was dazed, and his field of view was obstructed by dust and the cracked windshield, but the gunmen were slowed as well, and they looked directly at him. They apparently did not recognize the BMW as a threat; they assumed, obviously, that another motorist had crashed his car behind all the commotion on the on-ramp from the overpass.

Jack Ryan fought through the fog of his daze. Just as the gunmen refocused their attention on the crashed cab, kneeling down to look inside the inverted vehicle with their submachine guns at the ready, Jack drew his Glock, raised it with unsteady hands, and then fired through the smashed windshield.

Over and over and over he dumped rounds at the two men in front of him. One flipped back into the grass, his weapon tumbling away from his crumpled body.

The other man fired back, and the windshield just to Ryan’s right blew in, spitting bits of safety glass into Jack’s face. Jack’s own spent casings bounced around the inside of his car, singeing his face and arms when they pinged off him on their way to the backseat or down to the floorboard or passenger seat in the front.

Ryan emptied his pistol at the two threats, firing thirteen rounds in total. When his gun locked open he executed an emergency reload, pulling a spare magazine from inside his waistband on his left and slamming it into the butt of the gun. As he got his weapon back into battery and aimed it, he saw the surviving gunman retreating back to the van, falling twice on the way, obviously wounded.

And then the van screeched out into high-speed traffic on the Rock Creek Parkway. It sideswiped an SUV, sending the other vehicle crashing into the center divider. The dry-cleaning van then raced off to the north.

Jack climbed out of his BMW, stumbled in a daze, and then raced over to the taxi. He knelt down. “Melanie!” He saw the cabdriver, a young Middle Eastern man, still strapped in his seat belt, and he was obviously dead. Part of his forehead was missing, and blood drained down onto the roof of the car below him. “Melanie!”

“Jack?”

Ryan turned around. Melanie Kraft stood behind him. Her right eye was dark and puffy, and there were cuts on her forehead. She had climbed out of the other side of the cab, and Jack was relieved to see her on her feet, with only minor scrapes. But looking in her eyes he saw complete shock, a dazed look that told him she was lost, confused.

Jack grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to his BMW, pushed her into the backseat, and then leapt into the front.

“C’mon, baby! Please start!” Jack said as he pushed the ignition button.

The luxury sedan fired up, and Jack slammed it into gear and then sped off to the north, pieces of the smashed vehicle tumbling around the passenger seat, and small pieces of safety glass blowing off the broken windshield, hitting him in the face as he raced away.

Melanie Kraft woke up to find herself lying on her side in the back of Jack’s car. All around her was broken glass and spent shell casings. She sat up slowly.

“What’s happening?” she asked. She touched her hand to her face and found a little blood, then put her hand to her right eye and felt the swollen eyelid. “What just happened, Jack?”

Ryan had pulled off the parkway, and now he turned onto a series of back roads, using his in-car GPS to keep his journey off the main roads to avoid being noticed by law enforcement.

“Jack?” she repeated.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Who were they? Who were those men?”

Ryan just shook his head. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and made a call. Melanie listened to his side of the conversation.

“Hey. I need your help. It’s serious.” A short pause. “I need to meet you somewhere between D.C. and Baltimore. I need a car, and I need you to watch over someone for a while.” Another brief pause. “It’s a fucking mess. Come armed. I knew I could count on you, John. Call me back.”

Ryan put the phone back in his pocket.

“Please, Jack. Who were they?”

“Who were they? Who were they? They were Center’s people. Who the hell else would it be?”

“Who is Center?” Melanie asked.

“Don’t lie to me. You have been working with Center. I know it. I found the bug on the phone.”

Melanie shook her head slowly. It made her head hurt to do so. “I don’t… Is Center Lipton?”

“Lipton? Who the hell is Lipton?”

Melanie was so confused. She just wanted to lie down, to throw up, to get out of the moving car. “Lipton is FBI. National Security.”

“He’s with the Chinese?”

“The Chinese? What’s wrong with you, Jack?”

“Those men back there, Melanie. They work for Dr. K. K. Tong, code name Center. He’s a proxy agent for Chinese Ministry of State Security. Or at least I think he is. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”

“What does that have to—”

“The bug you put on my phone. It came from Center, it told Center where I was, and it listened in on my calls. He tried to kill me and Dom in Miami. They knew we were there because of the bug.”

“What?”

“The same group killed the five CIA operatives in Georgetown. And today they tried to kill you.”

“The FBI?”

“The FBI my ass!” Jack said. “I don’t know who Lipton is, but you have not been dealing with the FBI.”

“Yes! Yes, I have! FBI. Not the Chinese! Who the hell do you think I am?”

“I don’t fucking know, Melanie!”

“Well, I don’t know who you are! What just happened back there? Did you just kill two men? Why were they after me? I was doing what I was ordered to.”

“Yes, by the Chinese!”

“No! The FBI. I mean, at first Charles Alden with the CIA told me you were working for a foreign intelligence agency; he just asked me to find out what I could. But when he was arrested, Lipton called me, they showed me the court order, he introduced me to Packard. I had no choice.”

Jack shook his head. Who was Packard? He did not understand what was going on, but he believed Melanie. He believed she believed she was working for the FBI.

“Who are you?” She said it again. This time, however, it was softer, less panicked, more imploring. “Who do you work for, and don’t tell me you are in fucking finance!”

Jack shrugged. “I haven’t exactly been honest with you.”

She looked at him in the rearview for a long moment before saying, “No shit, Jack.”

Jack met John Clark in a parking lot behind a furniture store that was not yet open for business for the day. Melanie said little. Jack had talked her into giving him the benefit of the doubt for a short while so he could get her somewhere safe, and then they could talk.

But after a several-minutes-long consultation with Clark, out of Melanie’s earshot, Jack returned to the damaged BMW. Melanie sat in the back, looking straight ahead, still dazed by what she had gone through.

Jack opened her door and knelt down. When she did not look his way he said, “Melanie?”

She turned slowly. He was glad she wasn’t any more out of it than she was.

“Yes?”

“I need you to trust me. I know that’s hard right now, but I’m asking you to think back over everything that’s ever happened in our relationship. I won’t say that I’ve never lied to you, but I swear to you I have never, ever done anything to hurt you. You believe that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“I’m going to ask you to go with John Clark. He’ll take you back to his farm in Maryland, just for the day. I need to know that you are somewhere safe, somewhere where those guys can’t get you.”

“And you?”

“I have to leave town.”

“Leave town? You’ve got to be kidding.”

He winced; he knew this looked bad. “This is very important. I will explain everything when I get back, a couple days at most. Then you can decide if you still believe in me. At that point, I’ll listen to anything you have to say. You can tell me about this guy Lipton who you think is with the FB—”

“Darren Lipton is with the FBI, Jack.”

“Whatever. We’ll discuss it. All I am saying is, for now, let’s try to trust each other. Please go with John, and let him take care of you.”

“I need to talk to Mary Pat.”

“John and Mary Pat have been friends since before you were born. We need to lie low for right now, we don’t want to get MP involved just yet.”

“But—”

“Trust me, Melanie. Just for a couple of days.”

She did not seem happy about it at all, but after a moment she just nodded.

Clark drove Melanie away in the BMW. He knew a lake he could dump it in, and he already had Sandy heading there in her car to pick them both up.

Jack climbed in John’s Ford truck and headed to BWI to meet the Hendley Associates Gulfstream that would take him to Hong Kong.